The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (9 page)

By the summer of
2011, I had developed an evening routine that probably wasn’t dissimilar to that of many single men in their mid-thirties who live under the rule of cats. I spent a bit too much time watching epic HBO DVD box sets with my attention span compromised by Facebook, Twitter and text messages, stopping every now and then to rescue a vole inside an old coffee mug or gently remove a small set of jaws from my ankle (actually, maybe that wasn’t something other single men in their thirties who lived with cats did; just single men in their thirties who lived with Shipley). I ate quite healthily, if a little lazily, piercing a few more film lids than I would want to admit. If I also spent a bit too much time talking to my pets, then at least I could reassure myself that it was better than talking to myself and that I had an active social life.

My most animated conversations were generally with Shipley and Ralph, neither of whom had ever quite understood that not everything in life has to have a soundtrack. I could have blamed myself for allowing their rowdiness to get out of control over the years, but sometimes, as I knew only too well from the time I had spent in the company of my dad, my granddad and my dad’s uncle Ken, loudness runs in a family and there’s nothing you can do about it. Volume was the common ground reminding you that Ralph and Shipley came from the same litter, on the occasions you wondered how it was possible for two cats to be related when they looked approximately as different to one another as an undersized lion and a spider monkey.

An entrance was
always cause for fanfare. Had either of them owned a small trumpet, I’m sure they would have sounded it when they came through the cat door. I hoped that, just once, when they rushed through it, meowing at the top of their voices, they might lead me to an injured animal or a child trapped down a well, but it never happened.

‘RAAAAAAALPHHH!’ Ralph would shout.

‘Did that big crow say something derogatory about your sideburns again?’ I would reply.

‘RALLLRALLLRALLPH.’

‘Don’t worry. You’re fine. The metal clothes horse isn’t coming out today. All my laundry’s completely up to date. And I promise that if I do wash my hands, I’ll wait at least half an hour before I stroke you.’

‘RAAAAAAALPHHH!’

‘It’s Obama, isn’t it? You’re wondering if he’ll be the subject of a Republican smear campaign and not get in for a second term. I’ve told you, it’s too early to be worrying about that. We’ve still got the best part of a year and a half, so just try to relax.’

‘RAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLOOOOOO.’

‘Oh God. Don’t
tell me. You went for a long walk and someone was playing a Lily Allen song in their kitchen nearby with the windows open. I knew it. I’m sorry. Nobody deserves that. I should have been more sympathetic.’

My conversations with Shipley were frequently more caustic, particularly on his part. ‘You shouldn’t really say stuff like that,’ I’d remonstrate with him, as his heavy mortar fire of cat swearwords began. ‘It’s very hurtful, and some people are less thick-skinned than me.’

On that evening way back a decade ago, when Dee and I and our friends Steve and Sue had collected Ralph (who, at that point, before we’d been informed of his gender by a reliable source, had been known as ‘Prudence’), Brewer and Shipley from their original home in Essex, Shipley had been the ‘extra choice’: the cat Steve had called ‘the ugly one who looks like Yoda’, but whom I’d been swayed into taking home by his adorably awkward, runtish exuberance. That first night Ralph and Brewer had curled up in the respective crooks of my right arm and Dee’s, but Shipley had slept quietly alone at our feet, in an ‘It’s OK – I know my place!’ sort of way. As it turned out, though, he didn’t know his place at all, and had only been preserving his energy before bursting into action the next day. Since then, the backchat had rarely stopped, except on the occasions when he was asleep or I turned him upside down. Even when I had parties, he could often be found in the centre of a group of my friends, disagreeing with them just for the sake of it, or making outlandish, boastful claims about his recent achievements.

If The Bear was
the quietly beating heart of the household, and Ralph was its face, then Shipley was its notoriously volatile public relations man: its very own version of Malcolm Tucker from
The Thick of It
. Nothing got past him, and his adrenaline was a constant presence in my life. I was so used to gently removing his claws from my posterior when sitting at the computer in an open-backed chair, or stopping him climbing up my leg when I was near the fridge, I often didn’t know I was doing it: each action had become just another humdrum, unconscious thing I did with one of my limbs, like sweeping my hair out of my face, or scratching behind one of my ears. While Ralph and The Bear seemed in completely different ways to be assured about their status as the most important cat in the house, with no need to boast about it, Shipley was on a constant self-publicity drive, keen to explain to everyone that he was the
real
important cat around here. He didn’t seem to mind whether his audience was me, his furry housemates, my friends, a man who had come over to cut the ivy out of my boiler or a mallard who wandered into the conservatory one day by mistake.

There was never any malice to it. His uncouth behaviour always stopped short of nastiness, and that was why, despite their long-term animosity, I never got to the point of permanently splitting him and The Bear up. Turn Shipley upside down, and he was fine. Jiggling him about a bit helped, too. I’d never seen any animal, or human, able to go so quickly from petulance to docility. The only feline mood swing I’d seen come close to it was a few years ago when I’d offered Ralph a piece of leftover chicken balti then immediately washed my hands and assembled the metal clothes horse.

When I arrived
home with heavy shopping bags, Shipley was invariably the first to greet me. Though I might be tired and desperate to eat, I followed the logic of all gullible idiots, putting my shopping bags to one side and feeding the cats first. If I’d bought bread, I knew I had to be quick getting the cat food into the bowls, as experience had taught me that the absolute maximum you could leave a sliced loaf unattended before Shipley would eat it was twenty-seven seconds. Had I placed a slice of bread in Shipley’s food bowl, he would have sniffed at me in the manner of an ungrateful heiress who’d never known suffering, then walked away, but if the bread was packaged and ostensibly out of bounds on the kitchen counter, it was different. This was yet another example of the fact that cats don’t just make haste for the Munchies taste, but for the sweet taste of nonconformism.

When the cat food itself was placed on the floor, Shipley tore through it at twice the speed of his peers, and – if I didn’t stay vigilant – would swiftly move towards Ralph or The Bear, nudge them out of the way and start on theirs. I’d seen Ralph casually pummel Shipley when his sleek black brother got out of hand in other situations, but when it came to dining matters, he was willing to move aside. Surely food was important to Ralph, as a cat approximately the size of a sports utility vehicle? Maybe it was, but clearly not so important as it was to Shipley, whose metabolism somehow managed to transform all that meaty sustenance into pure muscle: the kind that allowed him to be the only one of my cats who could force my bedroom door open in the middle of the night using his sheer wiry strength.

The Bear had a
very different approach to mealtimes. When the other cats were around, he hung back, watchfully. He was the only feline I’d ever met who signalled his hunger not by cursing, meowing or using my leg as a scratching post, but by nodding subtly towards the food cupboard. He usually bided his time before doing this; having waited until the other cats were out tormenting a squirrel or vole, he would then quietly creep into the kitchen and catch me on my own. Bafflingly, he seemed to be able to distinguish, before the shopping bags were open, the times when I’d bought him turkey from those when I hadn’t. His most vocal request, at times like this, would be a tiny, persuasive
meeoop
– never anything more.

Similarly, The Bear was always at his most affectionate and playful when there were no other cats around. He still wrestled with a five-year-old squeaky toy mouse far more enthusiastically than you’d expect from an old age pensioner, but if he thought another cat was watching him, he’d abruptly bring a halt to proceedings. The times when he sat on my lap were rare; they involved a vast amount of nervous circling for position, and only occurred when Ralph and Shipley were well out of sight. Since I’d been living on my own, I had worked my way up to a point with Ralph where more or less all I had to do to get him to sit on my lap was look at him with a raised eyebrow. The Bear needed much more encouragement, but, once in position, there was no doubting his commitment. I’d never known a cat to purr for more lengthy, sustained periods. His purr had a high-pitched quaver to it, as if, just as he seemed to experience hurt in an exaggerated manner, he experienced happiness that little bit more acutely than other cats. I also felt he was trying to explain something to me. ‘OK,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘This is just a taste of how things could be, if you ditched those two other losers. I’m leaving it up to you, but to my mind there’s only one way to go here. We’re both men of the world. Well, me more than you,
obviously
, but I think it’s demeaning both of us to live with creatures of lesser intelligence.’

It was during
one of these intense one-on-one moments with The Bear that, in July, I finally got a proper look at Andrew. He’d been visiting ever more frequently, and was gradually working his way backwards through my LP collection. I’d put all the albums in protective polythene sleeves, but I was still very concerned: the Jimmy Webbs had already got it in a major way and all the signs pointed to my original copy of Scott Walker’s seminal 1969 album,
Scott 4
, being next. More troublingly still, I’d caught The Bear following his example. It had been a while since The Bear had soiled anything indoors, and I’d forgotten just how hard it was to be angry with him when he did. As I watched him spraying a small jet of urine over Stevie Wonder’s
Innervisions
and
Songs in the Key of Life
, he gave the nearest approximation of a carefree smile that I had ever seen on his features. I placed him firmly outside on the balcony, remonstrating ‘This is beneath you, The Bear!’ and attempting to reason with him in other ways I felt might appeal to his intellectual vanity, but within half an hour, he was back inside, eating cooked turkey out of my hand and doing his most ecstatic chirrup-purr.

As this exchange
occurred, I could hear a loud munching from the corner where I kept the biscuit dispensers. I assumed that the animal making the noise was Ralph, who ate with the same slobbery gusto with which he snored and purred, so it was an even bigger surprise, a minute later, to see Andrew emerge from the alcove, stop dead in his tracks and stare straight at us. I was amazed at the softness and sweetness of his face up close. This was not the face of a predator or a thief. It was not even the face of an Andrew. It was a dreamy, moony face: the kind of face you wouldn’t be surprised to find at twilight wandering in a daze around a foreign campsite, looking for its tent.

The stand-off between Andrew and The Bear and me only lasted twenty seconds, and concluded with our feral friend’s usual balustrade-hurtling exit towards the cat-flap, but seeing him up close gave me hope for our future together – or his future living with my parents, at least. Not only did there seem to be loving potential in his face, but I’d noticed scabs around his ears, more evidence that he was homeless.

Not that I had
any shortage of new tenant offers elsewhere. Barely a week went by without someone offering me a cat to adopt, but I was determined to stand firm for the time being. Nor were the offers limited to the whiskery. After I’d visited an animal rescue centre in north Norfolk, Jane, a friend who volunteered there, offered me a pygmy goat to adopt. The idea was appealing, but I had to decline, having researched a) just how much different stuff goats like to eat, b) just how much of that stuff is poisonous to them, and c) just how much it would bankrupt me to make the garden goat-proof. I reasoned that if I couldn’t afford a new roof and shed for myself then I probably couldn’t afford them for a waist-high horned creature with a chequered past.

In another of my less pragmatic moments, I did seriously consider an alpaca. I even carried out some research into the matter, going trekking with a few of them in the company of Mary and Will – who, Mary was often heard to claim, ‘looks a lot like an alpaca’ – near Wells-next-the-Sea on the Norfolk coast. Alpacas originally hail from South America, and are part of the same camelid family that includes camels, llamas – the creature which, with the possible exception of Will, they most resemble – and guanacos. They differ from llamas in being smaller and more sheeplike, and in being bred primarily for their wool.

They’re quite common in Britain now, yet a surprising number of people are still unfamiliar with them. ‘What’s an alpaca?’ asked a couple of friends, to whom I patiently explained that it was a character from the children’s TV show
In the Night Garden
which had escaped and now lived wild, surviving on its wits. My mum was surprised when I explained to her that ‘alpaca trekking’ meant ‘alpaca walking’ and not ‘alpaca riding’, but even a seven-year-old child passenger would probably have proved too weighty for the six alpacas I met. Macchu, Picchu, Pedro, Costello, Padro and Pepe were all much daintier once you got close to them and realised just how much of their bulk was made up of fur.

I’d fancied
alpaca or llama trekking for a few years, and not just because I felt it was the closest I might ever get to recreating the early scenes of
The Empire Strikes Back
. After an unsuccessful call to a local llama sanctuary, whose denizens were suffering from the viral ruminant disease blue tongue – an affliction I’d made the mistake of referring to in the recent past as both ‘blue tooth’ and ‘camel toe’ – my search had led me to Ian, a sleepily cheerful man in late middle age with a sun-blasted face that spoke of the happiest kind of north Norfolk life. Ian booked me, Will and Mary in for a two-hour trek with his fleet of charismatic alpacas. It turned into something very close to what Will repeatedly described as ‘The best day ever!’ but then if I was being honest I’d suspected it wouldn’t be anything less, right from the moment Ian had answered my opening question, ‘Is now a good time to talk?’ with the statement ‘Well, I have hold of six alpacas and a cheese sandwich, but, yes, it’s fine.’